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Butterfield: Overcoming the Earth

By Anne Butterfield

Posted:
01/06/2013 01:00:00 AM MST

Could there be a mightier symbol of humanity overcoming the Earth than huge trash heaps leading up to the summit of Mount Everest?

The "Roof of the world" is supposed to be the hardest place in the world to reach, but in the 60 years since Sir Edmund Hillary summited Everest with Tenzing Norgay, the great mountain has acquired some 50 tons of trash left by about 4,000 climbers from around the world.

In 1996, 98 climbers summited; in 2007, more than 500 did. A full time medical clinic is at base camp, plus high altitude helicopters to serve the injured. Ranging in age from 13 to 76, the climbers are a throng of ambitious achievers with deep pockets, and, due to the recent use of electronic media to document the exploits, a second wave of travelers have come who are less inclined to disciplined effort than to bagging the peak by way of stealing the air, gas and food from the camps of genuine climbers along the way.

This ego rush at Everest is not just a display of larger world population in general, but also of heavier environmental capability and footprint per person, empowered by fossil fuels and egged-on by electronic media that bring climbing exploits to be widely known -- and coveted. Add a dash of human vice, of course.

Although Everest's mess is being cleaned up lately, it is a parable for the state of our planet where developing nations race to catch up on a shocking the division of wealth with the developed world, a wealth long paraded in various media. And as that wealth has grown along lines of commerce that straddle huge geographic spans, garbage patches of biblical proportions have also grown in the Pacific Ocean that are comprised of plastics from container ships and urban runoff, floating about in high pressure zones to catch rays and tempt sea turtles indefinitely.

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New reports by World Wildlife Federation and the Global Footprint Network expound on humanity's ecological footprint and find that the demand humans put the planet, in terms of pollution, land use, and water and resource consumption, has overshot the Earth's ability to balance the demand -- and it happened back in the 1970's. Since then, the world population has leapt from 4 billion to 7 billion, and industrialization and use of fossil fuels have spread like wildfire in the fast-growing "BRIC" nations of Brazil, India, and China. Clearly, shifting to efficient and renewable generation of energy, smart land and water use will dampen the per capita footprint. But bringing down the population is the basis to giving our world more elbow room and a chance to repair the Earth-to-humanity relationship.

As a subsidiary of the United Nations, The UN Population Fund has just announced that family planning and voluntary access to contraception are a human right, emphasizing the health and economic promise of women by empowering them to avoid unwanted serial pregnancies. Voices in the Catholic Church have of course shunned this as a bunch of made-up morality, as if it the Catholic Church has not also made up moral codes such as papal infallibility and "natural law." With a nice outreach to contemporary women, it has been added that contraception institutionalizes vice.

So it's utterly refreshing that a prominent leader among U.S. evangelicals, Richard Cizik, has just named family planning and contraception as green technologies: "Whether the world population is going to be 8 billion or over 10 billion will depend significantly on the policy and programs we adopt and the seriousness of the international community to make family planning a priority."

Meanwhile, the value of not having children and perhaps only adopting them is growing as a vision for nurturing the environment and the human species. In the mind of my stepson Toby this stems from a growing social acceptance of that position and the sense that "to the earth there is much responsibility, but to a social order as previously understood, we are a little more unfettered and we can invest time, energy and money on ourselves."

And they have earned the right to call it like they see it, because back at Everest where pristine surroundings belong, thefts, extortion and violence have been reported, as glaciers and snow packs melt away to reveal trash left from the time of Hillary, plus many cadavers. It's mete for the next generation to explore a new vision for being pro life, for they shall inherit the Earth.

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